Meet our people: Design & Creative

Logan Sandrock Baird

Logan is a design consultant at Emma, helping to coordinate customer design requests and manage the overall in-house process behind them. Also, one of Logan's cats has extra toes and, as a result of a naming process that clearly took months of planning, research and debate, is called Mr. Toes. (The extra digits are used mainly for mischief-causing and extra cuteness, the latter of which allows Mr. Toes much more latitude regarding the former.) In addition to Logan's work at Emma and with polydactyls, he is also a life coach and a volunteer mediator with the Nashville Conflict Resolution Center, where he applies his Zen-like calm, Beck-like locks, Bob Ross-like voice (go with the visual, people) and in-depth knowledge of Battlestar Galactica to help others find peace — real peace, not like that fake sham of a peace the Cylons offered to the humans of the Twelve Colonies with help from that traitor Baltar. It breaks the Zen-like state even thinking about it, doesn't it?

Lee Floyd

Lee is on our brand creative team and works a lot with motion graphics, illustrations and the like. He is also an Instagram fanatic whose favorite subjects include things like the sky, and the floor, and lighting, which sort of makes it sound like more of a camera-aiming problem than anything. There really is interesting stuff straight ahead, Lee. When he isn't designing or creating at Emma, Lee is often DJ'ing for his colleagues, being very much into music as a player, fan, critic and collector with nearly 5,000 records and CDs at home and a robust mixtapes site he maintains. Lee also rescued a Chihuahua puppy he named Nacho, so if you notice a squirmy little duffle bag making its way through the office, that's probably just Nacho. We really, really, really hope that's Nacho. Could someone maybe open the bag either really low or really high so we can take a picture and be sure? Thanks.

Brian Fuzzell

Brian was once on The Price is Right. He's also part of Emma's production design effort, but we thought his brush with Bob Barker-dom was more important than anything else we can say here. To clarify, he didn't actually make it onto the PIR stage, but he was positioned right behind the bidding stations and wound up on camera shouting at people to bid one dollar, one dollar, ONE DOLLAR! Smart, Brian. Smart. Like a number of his co-workers, Brian is a musician and was once a serious, touring musician, having jammed with Conan O'Brien (take that, Bob Barker) and gotten used to sleeping in the cramped corner of a touring van. It was really the sleeping in uncomfortable vans, not so much jamming with A-list celebrities, that led Brian to rethink his career direction. He still plays on the side in a band called the Foxymorons, and his nickname at Emma is actually Barry, so if you could please re-read this entire paragraph mentally inserting "Barry" any time it says "Brian," that'd save us a bunch of rewrite time.

Lauren Johnston

Lauren is a graphic designer at Emma, and the bad news is that she has a 12-pack-a-day habit. The good news is that it's a gum habit! The other good news is that they're not 12 packs of Big League Chew. And the even better news is that it's not grape-flavored Big League Chew, which, to be quite honest, is just gross. In addition to her gum connoisseurness, Lauren is also known for her hair ornamentation and comic timing. Those things typically go hand in hand, right? Lauren hails from Austin and attended the high school on which the movie Friday Night Lights is based. (Her dad was even an extra in the TV series.) She holds a degree from Belmont University and promises to cut back to 10 packs a day at some point. We're pretty much out of good news on the gum-chewing front.

Emily Konouchi

Emily spearheads Emma's communication efforts, making sure customers and staffers are in the loop about, well, everything. Emily studied Latin and Greek literature at Agnes Scott College (show-off) but now has to settle for reading books in plain old English as a member of a local book club (still a bit show-offy). Speaking of literature, she is an Anne of Green Gables fan, having watched the film version of AOGG whenever she had the flu as a child. By the time Emily had recovered from the illness, Anne would invariably be all grown up, having transcended her humble beginnings. It's the Cliffs Notes version of the story, but you get the idea. Emily is also a fan of Ben Folds and all things Beatles, even, dare we say it, Yoko. Turns out that by the time Emily had recovered from the illness, Yoko would have transcended her humble beginnings to break up the greatest band of all time. It's a much sadder story than AOGG.

Chris Korbey

Chris is Emma's Creative Director. He became our Creative Director (let's just call it CD to save a few letters in case we need them later, shall we?) after successful stints as an art director at Addison, design director at Sequel Studio and founder and CD (see, this is already saving an enormous amount of space) of his own Dallas-based creative shop, Meat+Bones. Chris is an avid skateboarder, describing himself as "relentless and underwhelming" at the sport. Those qualities might also describe Chris's abilities in the sport of car purchasery, which has happened often and with mixed results. Once, Chris bought an old diesel Mercedes and the brakes actually failed on the short drive home. He learned two things that day: first, it's a good idea to check a car's brakes before you buy it; and second, it's maybe not a good idea to buy a car from a fella wearing an ill-fitting hairpiece and operating out of the parking lot of a gentlemen's club. Maybe. Chris shares his cars with his wife Holly and his three sons, all of whom can skate "vert" and knit scarves, but not at the same time.

Kelly McClain

Kelly McClain is a designer at Emma. A graduate of Western Kentucky University (known in these parts as WKU for hopefully obvious reasons), Kelly has studied print and interactive advertising and picked up an invaluable tip during one of her drawing classes: that even if you erase part of something you’ve sketched, the image will still be there, both on the paper itself and as a step in the process that eventually led to the final result. Look it, we’re not just all fun and games on the People Page — sometimes we actually learn something. Like in the movie, “What About Bob?”, which is chock full of life lessons and just so happens to be one of Kelly’s favorite films, if you’ll pardon us for using the words film, what, about and Bob in the same sentence. Richard Dreyfus really does the I’m-really-worked-up thing well, doesn’t he. Kelly also enjoys cats, sewing, the guitar (she’s taking lessons), the environment, the color red, and tuna. Everything else, Kelly is completely and utterly against.

Christy Montoya

Christy is a consultant on our design team. Hailing from Arizona, she is an avid outdoorswoman and likes to hike, camp, canoe and generally be outside. Unfortunately, much of her job at Emma happens inside, which is so typical of The Man, isn't it - forcing outdoorsy people to go inside. Whatever! Down with The Man and his Work-Indoors-or-Else Edict! Enough is enough! Wait, hold on, we actually need people indoors, so, ahem, it's entirely appropriate to expect employees to work in an indoor environment, provided said environment offers ample seating and pens. When Christy isn't staying indoors entirely against her will or adventuring outdoors on her own, she's often helping others, as a coordinator for Ellie's Run, spending time in Africa working with street kids, orphans and students, helping African immigrants get settled in Nashville, supporting the homeless in Nashville - you name it. She is, to use the technical term, a really good person. Christy grows her own organic vegetables (outdoors - take that, The Man!) and is currently learning Spanish. Indoors, or adentro, as luck would have it.

Cody Newman

Cody is on our creative team, working in both still and motion design for Emma's brand and clients. He has a contagious laugh (seriously, keep your distance if you have a lot planned this week and can't afford to come down with laughter right now), and he's funny enough to have inspired someone else to create a Twitter channel entirely devoted to the funny things he says. He also has a lot of nicknames. A lot. Here are a few: Code, Codeman, Coder, Codes, Corey, Curdy, Cody-quai, Code-Master-Flex, Cousin Coltrane and Puddin' Cup. That last one just might be in reference to Code-Master-Flex's love of banana pudding — a love so strong the Codeman's friends once blindfolded him and drove him to the National Banana Pudding Festival, which actually exists. Many Puddin' Cup tweets were tweeted that day, we're sure of it.

Suzanne Norman

Suzanne is a senior member of our brand and creative team, helping bring Emma's style and voice to pretty much everything we do, with the notable exception of the way we unload the dishwasher, the doing of which does not necessarily require having style so much as having, you know, arms. As an undergrad at Baylor University, Suzanne was a member of Phi Beta Kappa (some kind of pot-luck supper club, we're told) and worked as an editor of student papers for a teacher who was once kidnapped by gypsies. It's a long story. Today, Suzanne is known for her strong dislike of coats, her affinity for the color green and a rather involved incident that occurred when someone showed up to the office wearing a jacket in a lovely shade of jade. It's also a long story.